How powerful is the brain really?

I love to hear about things like hallucinations and sickness' that came because the person thought he/she was sick. So i was wondering if anyone has heard of some really cool stories on how our mind and brain has tricked our body into doing things it wouldn't normally do.

Such as that CSI (or whatever series) episode where a girl showed all the signs of pregnancy without actually being pregnant simply because she wanted so much to be pregnant (by her father).

anyone have any personal stories? or folk tale they can throw at me?

[edit on 20/10/08 by Ghost147]

[edit on 20/10/08 by Ghost147]

"Hilutionation?"

Are we a little bit intintyoxicated?

I have one personal one I can give you. One of my ex's had once had a bad bodily injury. He said that he could feel it somethimes, even though it had healed. When I spent a lot of time "in his bubble," I would begin to get an intense itch in the same place.

reply to post by asmeone2


lol, excuse my horrid spelling. (fixed)

hmmm, maybe subconciously you were thinking about his incident?

Originally posted by Ghost147
reply to post by asmeone2

 

lol, excuse my horrid spelling. (fixed)

hmmm, maybe subconciously you were thinking about his incident?

we actually talked a bit about it and thought it was soemthing more like his body's electrical field influencing mind... which I guess would still be the brain.

BTW, it's "hallucination"... not hilusonations.... but I got to give you props for creative spellings.

aw god damnit. lol google has lied to me!

I have heard of documented cases where people with diagnosed multiple personality disorder have, while in one personality, been shown to have cancer. While experiencing another one of their personalities, the tests for cancer would come up negative. Pretty crazy / amazing / spooky.

If you believe it is this organ that creates it. Then hands down, bar none, this is the most powerful thing the brain does:

it creates entirely new Worlds and personalities every night. It dreams..

I hear stories all the time of amputees having phantom pains in missing limbs or just getting an itch on a limb that is no longer there.
Try this on someone.Blindfold them and get something very cold, than tell them your going to burn them with something, often as soon as you touch them with the cold object they will scream and believe they have been burnt.

en.wikipedia.org...

There's an amazing example. I read about this years ago in a book of paranormal type incidents and other wierd stuff. Basically, there is this group of Australian aborigines that are so scared of this particular 'bone pointing' ritual that their brain will actually cause them to seize up and die from the fear. It's pretty much certain death to an aborigine because he is conditioned from birth to believe that it will kill him, but anybody else so attacked would just stand there and wonder why the heck this shaman guy was pointing a bone at them.

I've always found cases of 'hysterical strength' pretty impressive.

This occurs when a situation causes people to become far stronger than they normally are in their everyday lives. A specific case i remember hearing about was a woman who lifted up a car because her son was trapped under it.

health.howstuffworks.com...

It's interesting how the 'safeties' of the brain can be overridden in extreme circumstances however the effects on the body must be pretty damaging.

reply to post by Thebudweiserstuntman


yeah! the same thing happend to my mom and her dad. She was ran over by a semi truck, and my grandfather lifted it off.

One example for you...
According to quantum mechanics the desk your monitor is sitting on is not solid. Go ahead, knock on it, feels solid doesn't it? It can't be though, it's made of atoms, and they are not solid. The reason that it appears to be solid is because your mind believes that it is solid.
Your mind literally MAKES it solid. (to you anyway)

Thought IS reality, physical is the illusion...

[edit on 20-10-2008 by ashamedamerican]

You guys super human strength isn't the brain, it's all the organs

Originally posted by ashamedamerican
One example for you...
According to quantum mechanics the desk your monitor is sitting on is not solid. Go ahead, knock on it, feels solid doesn't it? It can't be though, it's made of atoms, and they are not solid. The reason that it appears to be solid is because your mind believes that it is solid.
Your mind literally MAKES it solid. (to you anyway)

Thought IS reality, physical is the illusion...

[edit on 20-10-2008 by ashamedamerican]

yes if thought about that. but wouldnt that theoretically mean that we can walk through it? or swim through it. why hasnt anyone been able to do this yet. surely someone has put their mind power to believing its not solid.

Thought IS reality, physical is the illusion...

[edit on 20-10-2008 by ashamedamerican]
surely someone has put their mind power to believing its not solid.

Don't you remember David Copperfield walking through the great wall of china?


But seriously, I dont know how exactly to put this, but here goes. Many people have, they just disappear when they accomplish it, they cant tell anyone about it because they fully realized, and their students consider it ascension.
On the other hand, many people accomplish this in a similar fashion, but do not disappear, but rather, the illusions disappear and they can only say they can then see, rather than just look, but of course having accomplished seeing, it is their will to choose at any given moment whether to see or to look. Those who see, and do not disappear, have chosen to postpone realization and can be considered bodhisattva, if their sole duty is to help others to realize, to come out of suffering and then some, with REAL EYES, otherwise, one who see's and does not help others to the same goal, is considered a sorcerer or black magician, or one who see's with clouded visions, as to truly see, is to either help others to see and then realize, or to manipulate those around you to your own service. psiack, off topic sorry.

"What is a good man but a bad mans teacher"

How powerful is the brain? Well, I look at it like this, the brain is what "I" operate, in turn, my brain operates "my" body. "I" am really god pretending to be the particulars of the realities. I create the physical universes so the physical universes will inevitably create beings which will evolve to eat psychedelic mushrooms witch in turn causes their brain to rapidly evolve turning them into what we now consider in this reality "homo sapient", whose brain capacity allows them to contemplate to such a degree, as to set all biased thoughts of the 3-d realm aside, sit in stillness and only observe, thus reporting back to me (god or source) the experiences of the hypothetically molded nothingness.(so to speak) Even though I can subjectively experience it all from each point of creation, it is a unique kind of commune to have your "ideas" echo back at you with the same frequency you initiated the creation with, like a tone whose echo comes back and causes feedback and reverberation, source and source creations co creating as one.

Thats how powerful the brain is, about as powerful as a sports car being driven by a mathematician, and the object is to figure out mathematical equations. Just meaning, the brain is pretty powerful, but not nearly as powerful as the essence that drives it.

dude, your avatar is awesome. I dont know wtf it is, but it tickles my mind with intrigue.

[edit on 10/21/2008 by psychedeliack]

This was one of the main themes on an episode of House (I believe it was called Airborne). They were flying in a plane, and one man started showing symptoms of a fatal and highly contagious illness. Once the other passengers found out about the man’s illness, they began showing symptoms as well.

Dr. House then said something along the lines of, “If you’re hands are shaking, you have the illness and need to stand up.” After he said this, the majority of the passengers jumped up saying their hands were shaking, but in fact this was not a real symptom of the disease, House just said it to prove that the people weren’t really ill, they just thought they were. Mass hysteria.

Also, one of my relatives was in a car wreck once, and his left arm got cut up and injured quite badly. He says that if he thinks about the incident, his arm will start hurting again, even though it’s completely healed and has been over a year since the accident.

This also reminds me of the “mind over matter” saying

Originally posted by Ghost147
yes if thought about that. but wouldnt that theoretically mean that we can walk through it? or swim through it. why hasnt anyone been able to do this yet. surely someone has put their mind power to believing its not solid.

Yes it LITERALLY means that we could walk through a wall, and although some people have have "put their mind power to believing its not solid" did they really believe it? You would (in theory anyway) have to believe that you COULD, more than you believe that you couldn't.

I think the main reason why you don't see anyone able to walk through walls is that it has been ingrained into the human psyche for literally thousands of years that we live in a physical world and that it's impossible.

Don't forget that quantum mechanics is relatively new, most people don't even know what it is, let alone understand the implications.

The mind is a VERY powerful thing, SO powerful that it would scare most people if they understood how much power every human latently possesses.

Look at the placebo effect, or the double slit experiment.
Our mind literally has the power to change the world around it.

reply to post by psychedeliack


Lol, my avatar gets alot of notice. i love it. its CG art done by Greg Petchkovsky. search him on google you'll find more.

As for your reality. i personaly, wouldnt think that is reality. it may be reality to that person who believes soooo much in what he see's and what not, but its only reality to that person. not globally. correct?

I have two personal experiences for you. When my children were younger, when they complained of a stomache ache, head ache, ear ache, etc., and I knew that there was nothing seriously wrong with them, I would tell them to come to me and I would fix it. I did this simply by putting my hands where they were hurting, closing my eyes, and then acting like it should be completely fixed a few moments later. This never failed and I assure you I have no "healing powers". It was the simple fact that they believed it would make them stop hurting and it did.

Secondly, it is not rare for me to have a vivid dream in which I get cut, burned, bruised and wake up with pain in that precise place on my body. There have even been a few times when there was redness or swelling afterwards.